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With the first day of school at the University of Manitoba this week comes an important day for the new dean of the Desautels Faculty of Music and the School of Art: the first day on campus with students.
It is a day that Stephen Runge has been looking forward to for weeks.
“The beginning of September is always fantastic in terms of energy, getting people back to campus,” he says. “I’ve spent a really busy summer getting to know my colleagues, my faculty and staff... and the part that’s been missing throughout the last four months for me, of course, has been the students. It’s really exciting to feel the campus filling up again and feeling that energy of back to school.”
That busy summer has included several substantial projects, including curriculum reviews and introducing new courses being offered to reflect a wider range of genres. Another significant event that Runge had to deal with in his first weeks on the job was the arrest of a member of the violin faculty in connection with an historical sexual assault. The school’s administration has been working to ensure that supports are in place for students as they return to the classroom and reckon with these revelations.
“We take all complaints, especially of this nature, very, very seriously at the university,” says Runge, noting that a wide range of services included a dedicated counselor for the Faculty of Music two days a week and several workshops dedicated to issues around wellness and mental health.
New concert series invites community into music on campus
One of the elements that is accompanying Runge’s new tenure as dean is a collection of concerts old and new that will add to the school’s musical calendar. That begins on September 19 with the annual homecoming concert, a fall highlight that kicks off the public activities in the Faculty of Music with performances in the Desautels Concert Hall and in Tache Hall.
Another addition to the public performance element at the university will be the new Desautels Concert Series, a collection of six concerts which will feature a wide range of performers over the course of the academic year. “We decided that it was time that we have our own concert series that really features our faculty and what they can do,” explains Runge.
The series kicks off on September 28 with baritone Mel Braun and pianist Laura Loewen performing a contemporary recontextualizing of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise alongside Winnipeg indie rock outfit VVonder and poet Hannah Green. The second concert takes place on October 19 and features the university’s jazz faculty in a concert called Beyond Ideas. The series resumes in January with two concerts, including the release of the new album from viola and composition faculty member Melody McKiver and a performance by the Winnipeg Chamber Winds Collective led by Jacquie Dawson. Edmund Dawe, the now-Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Music, will return to Winnipeg on February 8 to perform a recital of piano masterworks, and the series will close at the end of March with members of the faculty’s brass instructors presenting a program in conjunction with the Winnipeg Baroque Festival.
“It’s a series that’s designed to showcase a very, very wide range of music and all the things that the faculty are doing,” says Runge of the concert series.
School of Art welcomes Winnipeggers with presentation and conversation
Alongside events at the Faculty of Music, the School of Art will also be showcasing a wide range of works from within its community and in dialogue with the artists around it. That dialogue begins in earnest with its own dedicated homecoming event on October 3 and continues on October 16 with what Runge calls a capstone event on a project that has been in the works for the last few years.
“The School of Art has brought in three visiting curators over the past years who have put on exhibitions in the School of Art Gallery, given talks, worked with students,” he says, “and now, those three curators [Grace Deveney, Lillian O'Brien Davis, and Shalaka Jadhav] are coming back to campus. They’ll talk about the experience, the guest curator experience, and what they’ve been doing since then.”
The October 16 event will also feature artist Erika DeFreitas in a live performance and will see all four artists in a roundtable conversation. “It’ll be a really exciting way to look back on the experience that these three curators have had over the last years and where they’re looking to move forward in the future.
More information about all of the events taking place in the Faculty of Music and the School of Art can be found at the University of Manitoba’s website.